How Mimetic Desire Impacts Consumer Psychology and Branding, with Luke Burgis

Many aspects of the business world are explicit and overt. You can see advertisements, check bank statements, and track stock prices. However, there's also a more profound, invisible layer. It mediates what we desire in the first place, and how products are valued. It also fuels brand rivalries, drives innovation, and shapes consumer behavior. A significant component of this layer is mimetic desire: the idea that what we want is guided by what other people want.

To better understand this link between mimesis, consumerism, and business, we continue our conversation with author Luke Burgis. His newest book, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, probes the science and philosophy of mimetic desire, and its unappreciated influence on everyday life.

The book draws on a lot of examples from branding, entrepreneurialism, and consumer behavior. How do you see this connection between what happens in business, and what happens in life?

The business world holds up a mirror to social life. What we see in business tends to be what we have difficulty seeing in ourselves. I used examples from the business world because it’s something I have had intimate contact with, but also because it’s easier to view these things from a distance.

It's relatively easy, for example, for people to look at the stock market and see the meme-ification, or the mimetic desire driving stock prices, but not so easy when it comes to the memes and mimesis in our own life. I'm trying to help people realize that some of the things we see in markets go on in everyday life, too: In friendships, relationships, in this invisible, hidden underground world of mimetic desire. It's tough to just go there directly. It's like we need to start with something tangible, something at a distance, out in the world. And then hopefully, the next step is you start to see it in yourself.

This seems to be exacerbated with social media, and the fragmented media landscape more generally. How do you feel this context relates to mimetic rivalry?

The traditional media landscape is indeed becoming completely fractured. I'm seeing people leaving traditional institutions and forming micro-communities on platforms like Substack. And I'm not quite sure where that ends, you know? If everybody just finds a little tribe, I could see this producing a lot more mimetic rivalry.

Another major factor accelerating mimetic rivalry is social media. I know that with social media a lot is going on neurologically. Some of the user experience—notifications, scrolling incentives, suggested friends or follows—is built with the express intention of triggering certain physiological responses like dopamine release. A lot is happening there— things you know much more about than I do. But what I don't see a lot of people speaking about is what's happening socially. What is it doing to our desires? We need to probe this beyond the materialist perspective alone. The root problem cuts down to the sociological aspects—you could even say the spiritual elements—of the platforms.

It seems that business rivalries are dripping in mimetic rivalry. Brands are driven to differentiate from their industry competitors, but mimesis takes this even further. Could you elaborate on that?

I watched just last night an excellent documentary called The Foods that Built America. Each episode is about different brands that we know today and how they got their start. The one I watched last night was about Coke and Pepsi. It had the deepest connections to the mimetic rivalry of any episode in the series. Pepsi was the underdog. They realized that they needed to do something to change the game. Coke was outspending them tremendously in traditional advertising, so they had to do something drastic.

Pepsi made a genius move. It was a mimetic move! (something Eddie Bernays himself might’ve come up with.)

It was 1985, and at this time, it was unheard of for any kind of food or beverage brand to work with pop stars. But that's precisely what they did. They went out and got the biggest pop star on the planet, Michael Jackson. In the mid-’80s, he was at the peak of his fame and stardom. The amount of money they had to pay for him was outrageous, but it was worth it. For the next 10 years, Pepsi just took off and became a serious rival of Coke. What's most interesting about this move is that they completely stepped outside of the system. Pepsi found a person to link the brand to. This is commonplace now, but this was very radical at the time. They harnessed the power of mimetic desire.

Along these lines, you point to social media as a kind of breeding ground for mimetic desires and mimetic rivalry. What are your thoughts on newer iterations of social media, such as BitClout?

The new social media platforms, especially those tied to crypto (like BitClout), present serious challenges. There are even people talking about how everybody should have their own token, or their own coin, where you can basically make bets on people. It then becomes this world where everybody has a stock that can be traded. What that says about fundamental human dignity and equality is very troubling. To me, that's a very dystopian kind of world to live in.

Here again, the stock market becomes an analogy for almost every domain of life. It’s like there's an invisible market for all kinds of things like status and prestige that people are measuring. There's a market for ideas and reputations.

And just like there are bubbles in the stock market when equities are “overvalued”, there are mimetic bubbles in popularity, too. Certain ideas and reputations become fashionable, and then become unfashionable. There are all of these invisible markets out there that we can't see. And it seems like we're moving to a world where people want to make some of them visible. This is exactly what we see in the evolution of social media, with new platforms such as BitClout: An individual user's "stock price", more or less, is now out there. Man, I struggled with seeing my self-worth when I was in high school, and I can’t imagine having to check on my stock price every day.

As social media continues to evolve in this way, how do you think this will impact future generations? Particularly, younger users who have grown up with these platforms?

I don't know what that's necessarily going to mean. But I think this is one of the reasons that there's more anxiety and depression among young people today than ever before. I can't even imagine growing up in a world where I spent three or four hours a day on Instagram. I was born at a good time, in some sense, in that social media didn’t start taking off until I was halfway through college. I can’t imagine having had it in eighth grade.

I didn't even have a smartphone until I graduated from college. So I think children are going to need to understand these basic dynamics and develop some serious anti-mimetic machinery in their guts, or I fear some extremely negative consequences.

Photo by Peter Lawrence on Unsplash